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CHAPTER 28 — THE WORLD BELOW THE WORLD
Darkness swallowed them.Not the sudden darkness of extinguished light—but a falling darkness, rushing past Matteo in roaring wind and fragments of shattered stone. His body spun. His grip on the First Confessor tightened until his fingers screamed in protest.Then—Impact.The world slammed into him.Pain exploded through his spine. Breath fled his lungs in a violent rush. He rolled instinctively, coming to rest against cold metal that rang hollow beneath his weight.For a long moment, he could not move.He lay there, staring into nothing, listening to his own ragged breathing and the distant groan of ancient structures settling far above.When he finally sucked air into his lungs again, it burned.“Alive?” a voice rasped nearby.Matteo turned his head.The First Confessor lay a few feet away, propped against a slanted wall of blackened steel. Blood traced a thin line from her temple, glowing faintly where it touched the floor.“Barely,” Matteo managed.The darkness around them began
Chapter 27
The Prototype moved.Not fast.Not slow.It unfolded.Its body reconfigured itself with a wet, metallic sound that turned Matteo’s stomach. Plates slid aside, revealing muscle beneath—real muscle—veined with glowing blue circuitry that pulsed in time with the chamber’s heartbeat.This wasn’t a machine pretending to be alive.It was alive.The Adjudicator’s head tilted toward the First Confessor. Its face—once human—had been stripped of expression, mouth sewn shut with threads of living metal. Its eyes burned white-hot.“PRIORITY CONFIRMATION COMPLETE,” it said.“ARCHITECTAL ERROR LOCATED.”Matteo stepped in front of the First Confessor, blade raised.“You want her,” he growled. “You go through me.”The Confessor hissed sharply behind him. “You do not understand what you stand against.”“Then explain it after I kill it.”The Prototype’s gaze slid to Matteo.It paused.Analyzed.Its voice lowered—less mechanical, more… curious.“YOU ARE NOT LISTED.”The chamber lights flickered.Matteo
Chapter 26 - The Waking Of The First COnfessor
Matteo woke to silence.Not the easy silence of an empty street or a church before dawn.This silence was thick—like a living thing—pressing against his ears, his lungs, his thoughts.The ground beneath him was cold metal. Not stone. Not earth.Metal.He opened his eyes.The ceiling above him curved like the inside of a great iron ribcage, dimly lit by veins of pulsing blue energy that ran along the walls like arteries. The air tasted sterile, ancient, and humming with a soft vibration that set his teeth on edge.He tried to sit up.A spike of pain lanced across his ribs. The explosion had slammed him harder than he realized.He gritted his teeth and pushed upright.That’s when he saw her.A body lay a few feet away—unmoving, half-buried in shadows. Pale skin. Long hair matted with dust. Clothing he didn’t recognize—dark, ceremonial, woven with silver threads that shimmered faintly in the low light.His heart faltered.Symbols covered her arms, faint and glowing—curved lines shaped li
Chapter 25 - The First Echo
The city was wrong tonight.Matteo knew it the moment he stepped out of the safehouse and felt the air press against his skin—thick, humming, charged like the atmosphere before lightning splits the sky. The gas lamps flickered in unsettling rhythms. The shadows moved a half-second out of sync with their owners.Something was waking.Something old.“Keep close,” Father Arion whispered, gripping the rosary at his neck. The metal cross pulsed faintly, as if responding to the city’s heartbeat. “Whatever hunts tonight is not meant to walk this world.”Matteo didn’t answer. His hand rested on his blade—The Confessor’s Blade—still faintly glowing after the last cleansing. The Adjudicators had been restless for weeks, emerging from corners of the city they never used before… as if driven by a signal.A hidden command.A call.Tonight, Matteo planned to follow that call to its source.They reached the old district—once a monastery quarter, now a graveyard of burned chapels and crumbling stone.
CHAPTER 24 — The First Cut
The Confessor’s Blade did not burn in Elias’s hand.That alone should have warned him.He stood under the fractured awning of an abandoned transit station, rain dripping in soft, irregular rhythms around him, the city groaning like something sick that refused to die. The blade rested in his grip without resistance, without judgment, without warmth. It felt… ordinary.Too ordinary.Elias flexed his fingers around the hilt, testing it. The metal did not hum. No inscriptions shifted. No light bled from its edge. It behaved like steel.“Still works,” he muttered, forcing a grin that didn’t quite hold.Across the platform, the mysterious figure watched him in silence. Their staff was dim, its glow reduced to a barely-there pulse. They had not intervened when the blade accepted Elias. They had not spoken since.That silence weighed on him now.“You’re sure about this?” Elias asked, glancing over his shoulder. “It chose me. That has to mean something.”“It answered you,” the figure corrected
CHAPTER 23 — Architects of the Reckoning
Matteo did not wake, till much laterHe existed—suspended between thought and memory—while something older than language rearranged the truth around him. Sound returned first, not as noise but as rhythm. A slow, deliberate cadence, like footsteps echoing through a cathedral carved into nothingness.When his eyes finally opened, the hollow place was gone.He stood in a vast chamber that had no ceiling.The sky above was a living mosaic—fractured images stitched together: cities rising and falling, wars forgotten, empires consuming themselves. Time did not pass here. It pressed inward.Before him stood seven figures.Humanoid in shape, but wrong in detail. Their bodies appeared formed from stone that remembered being flesh. Their faces were smooth and featureless except for one shared marking engraved across their foreheads: a simple vertical line intersected by a horizontal one.A cross.But stripped of ornament. Of worship. Reduced to geometry.He understood then.Not men.Not monster
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